Bloomberg The UK’s thrifty health authority has cleared its most expensive medicine ever—a $700,000 GlaxoSmithKline Plc treatment for an illness known as “bubble-boy disease.” But the overall cost to the country’s medical system won’t be as eye-popping as the price suggests. Glaxo, Britain’s biggest drugmaker, said it has treated four patients with Strimvelis since it was approved by the European ...

RAMALLAH / Reuters Palestinians condemned as blackmail on Wednesday US President Donald Trump’s threat to withhold future aid payments over what he called the Palestinians’ unwillingness to talk peace with Israel. Trump drew praise from a cabinet minister in Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing government but a warning from a former Israeli peace negotiator of the dangers in cutting ...

Bloomberg North Korea contacted authorities in Seoul over a hotline for the first time in about two years, paving the way for a thaw during the Winter Olympics despite US President Donald Trump’s fresh taunts at Kim Jong Un. Officials from both countries spoke several times on Wednesday to conduct technical checks before agreeing to stop for the day, according ...

WASHINGTON / AGENCIES US President Donald Trump has signaled support for anti-government protests in Iran, but in two weeks he faces a decision on US policy towards the Islamic Republic that suddenly seems riskier than it did a week ago. The six days of demonstrations in several Iranian cities began over economic conditions, and Trump must decide by mid-January whether ...

AMMAN / Reuters The Syrian army backed by Russian jets escalated bombing of the last rebel bastion on the eastern outskirts of Damascus as they prepared to break a siege of an army base encircled by opposition forces, residents and witnesses said on Wednesday. They said the army was amassing elite forces to prepare for a major assault on the ...

Bloomberg President Donald Trump is hardening his demands for a deal to protect young undocumented immigrants from deportation, a dispute with congressional Democrats that hangs over talks this week to avoid a government shutdown. Any deal on the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA, must also forbid immigrants from sponsoring family members to join them in the US, ...

Today’s political discord is less durable and dangerous than a consensus, one that unites the political class more than ideology divides it. The consensus is that, year in and year out, in good times and bad, Americans should be given substantially more government goods and services than they should be asked to pay for. Lamentations about the paucity of bipartisanship ...

I guess a handshake with POTUS-to-be wasn’t a help after all. A year after Chinese billionaire Jack Ma met US President-elect Donald Trump, the founder of Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. has finally given up on his bid to buy MoneyGram International Inc. for $18 per share. The Committee on Foreign Investment in the US dragged its feet on giving the ...

Five years after two high-speed trains collided in the eastern city of Wenzhou, China’s railway companies are making a comeback. It’s not easy to find value after a 51 percent rally in the MSCI China Index during 2017. So lately, sell-side banks have been telling their clients a rail renaissance story. CRRC Corp., the world’s largest maker of equipment for ...

For the social-media business, this New Year is one of grim tidings. Every day, it seems, pioneers in the field are offering mea culpas — airing regrets, expressing caution, apologizing for a technology that seems to have run amok. One former Facebook Inc. executive recently conceded that the network is “ripping apart the social fabric.” A former engineer has warned ...